The building which exchanged hands on many occasions, was home to a cinema, theatre and dance hall, but to Derby folk is still known as ‘the old Telegraph building’
The story of the city’s Corn Exchange and once home of this newspaper, as told by Nicola Rippon
WE still call it “the old Telegraph building”. This newspaper may have moved home several times but, to tens of thousands of Derbeians, the distinctive, green-roofed building with its domed cupola and circular corner is still remembered as the place where people booked advertisements in pre-internet days, claimed their 10s 6d for being the face in the frame on a photograph of a crowd at the Baseball Ground, and occasionally pleaded for the non-publication of a shoplifting case “because it would kill my mother”.
But the old Northcliffe House was not always a newspaper office.
Derby’s city centre has had many entertainment venues, and none can have had more numerous or varied lives than that which was built in the 1860s as the Corn Exchange, on the corner of what are now Albert Street and Exchange Street.
Following the repeal of Corn Laws in the 1840s, many corn exchanges were built across the country to provide a location for trading in grains.
They were in use for only a few hours a week, however, which meant that Derby’s Corn Exchange was built as a multi-use venue with rooms that could be let out for meetings, auctions, concerts, dances and so on.
It continued to provide homes for those activities long after the Corn Exchange Company was wound up in 1881.
Derby’s Corn Exchange opened to much celebration in
January 1862 with world-famous opera singer Jenny Lind as the star attraction.
The “Swedish Nightingale” had already performed in Derby – six years earlier at the Lecture Hall. This time a man that the Derby Mercury called “England’s best tenor” – Sims Reeves – as well as opera singer Giovanni Belletti, celebrated violinist Henry Blagrove, cellist Carlo Piatti and Lind’s husband and pianist, Otto Goldschmidt, who supported her.
The Derby Mercury reported: “The audience were all seated a little before eight, and then the room presented a very brilliant appearance, and the advantage of possessing in a town like Derby a room where seventeen or eighteen hundred persons can be comfortably seated was strikingly apparent.”
The hall boasted excellent acoustics – “the first notes from Jenny Lind’s exquisite organ … floated as pure as tones from a bell all around the great room” and ‘Mrs Goldschmidt’, as the official programme styled her, was an outstanding success.
She “held her audience as if it were spellbound till the last note had died away”, noted the Derby Mercury.
The Corn Exchange was certainly an impressive facility.
According to the Mercury it was, barring the “noble Town Hall at Birmingham …unquestionably … the largest room in the midland counties”.
Over the years, many noted companies performed at the Corn Exchange, such as, in 1869, Mr Edmund Rosenthal’s London Opera and Burlesque Company.
The D’Oyley Carte Opera Company presented Iolanthe, shortly after which the Corn Exchange passed into the hands of Charles Morritt – a renowned hypnotist, mentalist and inventor act in his own right who had once sold tricks to Houdini – who renamed it “Morritt’s Empire”.
It was under Morritt’s guidance that public entertainment in the town was to enter a new era. In
September 1896, “Morritt’s Empire” brought the first moving pictures to the people of Derby.
The cinema had arrived, and life would never be quite the same again.
But there was theatrical life in the Corn Exchange yet. Between 1897 and 1914, the Corn Exchange operated as the “Palace Theatre of Varieties”.
One of the earliest acts to appear there that December was – “at enormous expense” – the “Derby Favourite, R. G. Knowles, the World-renowned comedian in his latest successful songs and sayings”.
Knowles was often billed as the “Very Peculiar American” – peculiar indeed, since he was Canadian.
Derby’s Corn Exchange was built as a multi-use venue with rooms that could be let out for meetings, auctions, concerts, dances and so on.
After the First World War, the old Corn Exchange reopened as a dedicated dance hall, the Palais de Danse, that closed in 1929 when the Derby Evening Telegraph moved there from their smaller offices in the Corn Market, renaming the building Northcliffe House in honour of the newspaper’s late owner, Viscount Northcliffe, formerly Alfred Harmsworth.
The newspaper was located there until 1981 when the business moved to purpose-built premises beside the Derwent.
It would be the last time all the editorial and production elements of Derby’s local newspaper would be located together in the city centre.
After the Derby Evening Telegraph left, much of the old Corn Exchange was divided up into shop and office units, while the former compositors’ room, which had once been the concert hall – a “large and beautiful music and assembly room” according to one critic – was transformed into a snooker hall.
Today, like so many aspects of our life, newspaper production has moved on, absorbing so much new technology.
But to Derby folk, “the old Telegraph building” stands as a fond reminder of the days when you waited patiently for the result of the 2.30 at Redcar rather than simply looking it up on your mobile phone.